So new Alpha is out and I just played a round and the changes to the game as it feels are minimal. The main aspect is supposed to be the progression system, something which I could not care less about. Anyway I copied the weapon changes

EMP:
Decreased the max damage range from 12 to 8 meters.
Decreased the fall off range from 50 to 40 meters.
Increased the min damage to 14.3.
Added 1 additional magazine on Spawn, one additional magazine on resupplying.

Developer comment: The SMGâs got an increase in effectiveness in short range combat, while being less effective on longer ranges.

MP40:
Decreased the max damage range from 12 to 8 meters.
Decreased the fall off range from 50 to 40 meters.
Increased the min damage to 14.3.
Added 1 additional magazine on Spawn, one additional magazine on resupplying.

Developer comment: The SMGâs got an increase in effectiveness in short range combat, while being less effective on longer r[anges.

Just to put it into perspective, I only played with the STG 44, where I could not seem to win any fight and the Gewehr 43 where I would seem to win every fight. I do not know what attachments they will have in mind for each weapon, or if there won't be any at all, but the automatic weapons definitely need something similar to BF4 attachments. The iron sights are just plain useless in a game so "rich" with visual effects and things going boom, making you lose your target that any optic will be a huge improvement.

One reason I can already tell for always losing with the Assault class is the way damage is dealt and you are notified on it. Basically you have no idea that you are being hit or that a hit does take away quite a chunk of your health nor do you really hear any shots whizzing by only the slight thump of being hit. Also the health bar is so unobtrusive that you will not check it at all. It needs to be bigger, in another colour and generally in an area that you look at anyway, which is not really the case in BFV with all the important info everywhere around the screen. No auto-regen also plays a great part, even if you have an attentive medic in your team. You will enter fights not thinking about the fact that one burst might take you out easily.

I also find a min damage of 16.7 a bit too low, considering the ROF and the visual difficulty of killing a target. There might also be some kind of moving accuracy modifier, but I find it hard to hit anything really.

One thing to note: I was shooting at a guy with the Gewehr 43 that was prone with his LMG and after he fired at me it took me three shots until another one connected although my corsshair was really on point and the weapon proved to be very accurete every other time. Might have been bad aiming, but it was such an outstanding performance drop of the weapon that I immediately thought suppression was back. Other than that I only noticed really nasty blur that took my attention from the HUD away even more, which I find dubious.

As a conclusion I find the Gewehr 43 to be extremely useful in ALL situations, it is a 2HK, at many ranges, 3HK every time, with a very comfortable ROF for the recoil as well as a scope making clear what you hit. The hipfire seems to be really good for the damage output as well. Now I would not want them to nerf this weapon, but rather use this weapon as an example of how weapons should work. The extra ammo on spawn is definitely a step in the right direction.

As far as everything else go, it seems you can actually have a squad now as I saw people from one clan in one squad. The UX/UI is still terrible, nothing changed there and the visuals are still nice to look at, but way overboard and hindering the gaming experience in my book. The sound from my boxes is unusually shallow for everything but explosions, other than that I do not hear shit. Especially not footsteps or shots or anything relevant. I believe a V2 knocked me over at one point but I have no idea, because there was no sound indication, nor a particularly big explosion. If I compare the sound to PUBG and former BF titles it is definitely a huge step back, but might change with headphones.

I tried to do some testing on this today, and I really couldn't say. There is the option again to have hitmarkers shaped according to damage, similar to how limb shots in BF4 gave a different hitmarker, so I would assume they are in, in some kind of way. However BFV gives you a hard time calculating anything just from the cluttered HUD. It is hard to single out each individual hit, with all the bonus points you get for headshots, squadwipes, and whatnot. Today I received 400 points for one kill and I have no idea how that happened. Also you are hitting and killing people with less than 100 health so there is no definite way to calculate how much damage each shot did.

On the other hand though, I played with BAs a bit today and I thoght I dished out a hit on the arm, which dealt 51 damage. This is a hit that I often receive by BAs as well. Considering the min damage of the Kar is 55 according to the official post, I would say that arm multis are back, but seem insignificant in terms of BTK. I also played quite a bit with the Gewehr 43 and every kill was either a 2 or 3HK. With the Stg 44 I never noticed a hit lower than 16 damage, which is right assuming the min damage is 16.7. But I can not say for sure, because it is hard to track individual hits without trying it on AFKs.

My personal assumption is that they are indeed in again, which I find unnecessary, but it seems the multiplicator is not relevant for the heavier hitting weapons, but this might vastly differ with automatic weapons and considering the high fluctuations in player health. I did notice some inconsistencies with the STG 44.

Quoted

Just a note that Alpha 2.0 weapon balance is more for gathering data, rather than being representative of the direction of the game.

I would hope so. Setting the weapon damages to numbers like 20, 16.7 with arm multipler is definitely a recipe for inconsistency.

Interesting in this build is the fact that the heavy hitting weapons remain basically untouched in their BTKs. I am not totally against arm multipliers, I believe they were in every BF game I played, but it totally got out of hand in BF1. One has to consider that most weapons have very low ROF and BTK therefore have an enormous effect on the TTK. Furthermore we do not have full auto-heal any longer so these times will be all over the place.

Generally the balance of weapons did turn out to be worse in my book. 16 and 14 damage at these ranges is not enough with that ROF. I also think that only showing damage numbers is misleading, as there seems to be a ton of other mechanics at work. Recoil with 600rpm weapons is easy enough to control, yet every kill is strangely inconsistent so I suppose there are quite the modifiers at work considering moving as well as burst lengths. I suppose there is way more spread involved than DICE ever told which is particularly noticeable as SIPS and the stupid spread increase multiplier that they likely kept. Spread decrease seems fairly low once more making bursting rather ineffective. Again DMRs and BAs seem largely unaffected.

Recoil also seems strangely random on the automatic weapons, but I can not put my finger on it. Maybe there are recoil multipliers for moving or something.

BF4 is too fast for me and BF1 feels strange (own character is slow, while everyone else is fast af). How would you (who played BFV) describe the movement/gunplay, if I only have BF4 and BF1 as a reference ?

I know that Symthicians dont like the term "feeling" since Hardline, but the "feeling" of the movement and "gunplay" is for me the most important factor right now, even more than weapon balance.

BF4 is too fast for me and BF1 feels strange (own character is slow, while everyone else is fast af). How would you (who played BFV) describe the movement/gunplay, if I only have BF4 and BF1 as a reference ?

I know that Symthicians dont like the term "feeling" since Hardline, but the "feeling" of the movement and "gunplay" is for me the most important factor right now, even more than weapon balance.

Hmm, movement felt off, but rather similar to BF1. I really can not get used to it. There are a few wonky bits, too, where your soldier will sometimes hold his weapon at angle and you can not get rid of it. It drives me crazy. Then there is the sliding and rolling stuff, that puts me off as well, albeit being realistic. It disorientates me and is detrimental to gameplay in my book. It does also seem that ADAD is very effective, naturally which such high TTK and low ROF, so I saw that quite a lot even in close quarters.

As far as the gunplay is concerned, I still think it feels horrible for the same reasons as BF1. Leaving stats aside that can change, it is very inconsistent obviously also from player to player. When I see videos on youtube the guns are all laserbeams, with no recoil and deadly accurate, but when I use them they bounce around and I miss because my bursts are too long. The game just does not give you the feeling that you are instinctively doing the right thing.
Much more pressing for the "feeling" of the guns are other factors though. The sound is unusually bad for a BF game, hard to localize and hear, or completely missing. The audio and visual cues of being hit or under fire are very limited. While they did get rid off the extreme muzzle flash of BF1, you are still fighting grey people in grey environments with a grey weapon with extreme lighting effects and huge amounts of visual clutter. All the while they removed any optical hints or help via minimap or spotting besides the autospot when aiming at someone, which does not really help the issue of identifying targets.

In conclusion, the gun mechanics are better in BFV than in BF1, but they did not adress the soft issues of low visibility (which was a huge problem in BF1) while also basically removing every form of help the previous games gave you to overcome it. Perfect example: You jump into a very dark house from an extremely bright outside, move up to the even darker attic, meet a guy in a grey uniform and shoot at him with your dark grey ironsights, while you could not have known that guy was up there by seeing, spotting or hearing him before. This makes weapon handling very inconsistent and feel bad.

On movement, from the footage I saw, I believe the movement is similar to BF1 where forwards, strafing and backwards are of the same max velocity, as opposed to forward faster than others in BF3/4. Also the strafe acceleration looks pretty similar to BF1 pre-ADAD-spam-nerf, so I can see some ADAD spam being effective. And you can see youtubers utilizing it too.